The Skywalker army now totals 20 new Chromebooks with the MediaTek Kompanio 540

In all our years of tracking the Chromium repositories, we have never seen a single baseboard spawn this many offshoots. To put it in perspective, a typical “prolific” baseboard might see 8 to 10 variants. ‘Skywalker’ just hit 20, and there is no sign that Google or its partners are slowing down.

The latest recruits: ‘Sheev’ and ‘Palpatine’

The latest additions to the Star Wars-themed roster are ‘Sheev’ and ‘Palpatine’. According to the recent commits, these two boards just received their initial audio configurations (CRAS and UCM), signaling that they are moving deeper into the hardware development phase.

Both devices are being built on the ‘Skywalker’ baseboard, utilizing the same MediaTek MT8189 (a.k.a. the Kompanio 540) silicon that is quickly becoming the new go-to standard for the midrange and education markets.

The full 20-device roster

By our count, here is the staggering lineup of unique devices currently tied to the Skywalker platform (not including the reference board itself):

1. ‘Obiwan’
2. ‘Luuke’
3. ‘Yoda’
4. ‘Anakin’
5. ‘Quigon’
6. ‘Baze’
7. ‘Tarkin’
8. ‘Phasma’
9. ‘Grogu’
10. ‘Starros’
11. ‘Finley’
12. ‘Dooku’
13. ‘Vader’
14. ‘Jaina’
15. ‘Mace’
16. ‘Kylo’
17. ‘Leia’
18. ‘Sidious’
19. ‘Sheev’ (New)
20. ‘Palpatine’ (New)

Why are there so many?

While a handful of these might end up as consumer-facing devices, the sheer volume of boards strongly suggests that the EDU space is about to be flooded with MediaTek-powered hardware.

And the Kompanio 540 offers a perfect sweet spot for schools: it’s powerful enough for modern web apps and Android use cases, but efficient enough to provide the exceptional battery life that educators really need.

Google and its OEM partners look to be going all-in with this SoC in the mid-range and EDU sectors, so it’ll be pretty interesting when they finally start to flood the market. While we’re obviously very excited for the higher-end offerings on the way like ‘Sapphire’ later this year, the ‘Skywalker’ story continues to evolve. It’ll be very fun to see how these devices fare in the classroom and how the ASUS Chromebook CM32 Detachable performs once it arrives this summer.